1.27.2009

In lieu of an actual blog post, let me tell you some of the events happening in and around the Biffle-Piepmeier household these days.

Maybelle spent her first night (three nights, actually) in a hotel room over the weekend when we were in Atlanta for a business meeting of the National Women's Studies Association. She goes to sleep really early, so we made her a little pallet in the closet. It worked out well: she had a dark, quiet spot, Biffle and I got to stay up and watch TV and talk, and it made us both giggle.

Flight of the Conchords is back! Check out this video of "Sugalumps" from this Sunday's episode. I no longer feel quite so cool about my love of the show, since it's gotten quite a bit of attention in the last year, but I'm still happy that they managed to come up with a second season. And I can still perform the entire "Rhymenocerous" rap.

My zine book is finally in production, and it has a title: Girl Zines: Redrawing the Lines of Power and Creating a Feminist Future. It'll be out in fall 2009 (as I might have mentioned before, academic books take a loooong time to be published). Although it's an academic book, it's fairly readable, it features interviews with a dozen fascinating zine creators, and it's going to be loaded with pictures--so, worth a look.

Maybelle has fallen in love with the ceiling fan. She seems to have an actual relationship with it. She'll remember it's there sometimes, look up at it, and give it a huge open-mouthed smile.

Zines are scruffy, individually made, photocopied documents that circulate through informal channels (i.e. someone makes a zine and then gives it to her friends). There are tens of thousands of them being made at any given time. A good website to check out is http://www.grrrlzines.net/index.htm.

Things you might want to know

Baxter Sez is

Alison Piepmeier was a professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston, and much, much more. When she wasn't working to bring down the patriarchy, she wrote here and elsewhere about feminist disability studies, Zines, her ugly car, and an eclectic range of topics. She also wrote about the brain tumor that eventually caused her death on August 12, 2016, at the age of 43.
Twitter: @alisonpiepmeier